March 28: Happy Birthday Reba McEntire

[TMC]

https://lebeauleblog.com/2017/03/28/...and-lady-gaga/

Posted by jestak2

Our recent abundance of musical birthdays continues today. Our headliners today are known, respectively, as the Queen of Country and the Princess of Pop (although neither is the sole claimant to her title).

Reba McEntire celebrates her 62nd birthday today. She was studying to be a teacher at Southeastern Oklahoma State University when country singer Rod Steagall heard her sing the national anthem at a rodeo competition, and helped her land a recording contract with Mercury. Her first album came out in 1977, but she didn’t begin to be a major success until the early 1980s. Her fifth album, Unlimited, resulted in her first two #1 Country singles, but she soon moved to MCA in order to have more creative control over her recordings. In 1986 Whoever’s in New England became her first #1 Country album, while the title song won her her first Grammy.

McEntire has had over twenty #1 singles and sold in the vicinity of 80 million records. She has played the character of Annie Oakley both on television, in the CBS movie Buffalo Girls, and on stage in the musical Annie Get Your Gun. She has made ventures into series television, most notably with her sitcom Reba, which ran for seven seasons on The WB and brought her a Golden Globe nomination. And many of us will always remember her debut film role, as Heather Gummer in Tremors.